Optimizing Cattle Behavior Analysis in Precision Livestock Farming: Integrating YOLOv7-E6E with AutoAugment and GridMask to Enhance Detection Accuracy

Recently, the growing demand for meat has increased interest in precision livestock farming (PLF), wherein monitoring livestock behavior is crucial for assessing animal health. We introduce a novel cattle behavior detection model that leverages data from 2D RGB cameras. It primarily employs you only look once (YOLO)v7-E6E, which is a real-time object detection framework renowned for its efficiency across various applications. Notably, the proposed model enhances network performance without incurring additional inference costs. We primarily focused on performance enhancement and evaluation of the model by integrating AutoAugment and GridMask to augment the original dataset. AutoAugment, a reinforcement learning algorithm, was employed to determine the most effective data augmentation policy. Concurrently, we applied GridMask, a novel data augmentation technique that systematically eliminates square regions in a grid pattern to improve model robustness. Our results revealed that when trained on the original dataset, the model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 88.2%, which increased by 2.9% after applying AutoAugment. The performance was further improved by combining AutoAugment and GridMask, resulting in a notable 4.8% increase in the mAP, thereby achieving a final mAP of 93.0%. This demonstrates the efficacy of these augmentation strategies in improving cattle behavior detection for PLF.